Book Reviews
The World on Sunday
Graphic Art in Joseph Pulitzer's Newspaper
(1898-1911)
By Nicholson Baker and Margaret Brentano
New York: Bulfinch Press, 2005
132 pages. $50.00
ISBN 0821257757
Baker notes in his introduction that once-discarded
newspapers are home to the stories and the essays of giants like John Steinbeck,
Thomas Edison, William Faulkner, and H. G. Wells.
One of the sad stories of our information age is the destruction
of old newspapers for the sake of saving space. The Library of Congress and
the New York Public Library have sold or discarded valuable collections of newspapers,
some of which were replaced with the abominable microfilm. This tragedy was
presented in detail by Nicholson Baker in his 2001 book, Double
Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper, and is driven home by this
book, The World on Sunday, in which
the reader can sample what has been deemed by some great institutions
as unworthy of safekeeping. A huge debt of gratitude is owed to Baker and his
wife, Margaret Brentano, for saving, among many other newspapers, a partial
set of Joseph Pulitzer's The
World, which they acquired from the British Library at a little-publicized
mail auction of its American newspaper holdings.
Fortunately, Baker and Brentano raised $150,000 by the time the auction bills
were due and acquired over 6,000 bound volumes of newspapers. These were stored
at a warehouse in New Hampshire until Duke University acquired the collection.
The World on Sunday presents a fascinating
selection of 128 pages from various Sunday issues of The
World covering the years 1898 to 1911. Compared with the selections presented
in this book, today's Sunday newspapers seem boring by comparison. The period
tackled by Baker and Brentano spans the apogee of The
World newspaper, which became extremely popular after the Hungarian-born
Joseph Pulitzer bought it in 1883. Pulitzer came to the United States in 1864
and eventually ended up in St. Louis, where in 1868 he was offered a job at
a German daily newspaper, the Westliche Post.
Four years later, he became publisher of the newspaper, and, in 1878, he purchased
the St. Louis Dispatch for $2,500,
which he merged with John Alvarez Dillon's Evening
Post, under the name Post and Dispatch.
In 1879, after moving to a new location, the newspaper became the St.
Louis Post-Dispatch, the highest-circulation paper in the St. Louis area
today. In 1883, his health in decline, Pulitzer decided to go to Europe on vacation
with his wife, Kate. During a stop in New York City, Pulitzer learned that a
local newspaper, The World, was for
sale due to its mounting losses. Seeing the immediate improvement in her husband's
health sparked by The World, Kate
encouraged him to postpone the trip to Europe and to purchase the newspaper,
which he did for $346,000.
One of the main objectives of The
World became
a crusade against corruption in government. This eventually led to a
public fight with Theodore Roosevelt, a character prominently shown on several
pages of Baker and Brentano's book, over the United States' purchase of the
rights to build the Panama Canal. In 1908, The
World published
a story charging that a consortium of U.S. businessmen had purchased
the rights from the French for $3.5 million and had in turn sold the rights
to the U.S. government for $40 million. Roosevelt was indignant when The
World accused him of having known about this deal and referred to Pulitzer
and his newspaper as "creatures of the gutter so low that they envy the
eminence of the dunghill." Pulitzer and his editors were indicted by the Roosevelt
administration, though the Supreme Court ultimately dismissed the charges. This
was the atmosphere in which The World competed
against several newspapers in New York City, including the Times,
the Tribune, the Sun,
the Herald, and other papers. Pulitzer
died in 1911, and in his will he left money for the establishment of
a school of journalism at Columbia University and an annual prize for journalism,
drama, literature, and music that was later expanded to cover other areas as
well-a prize today known as the Pulitzer.
One of the most fascinating aspects of The
World on Sunday is the color artwork by many talented but mostly forgotten
artists, including Walter Hugh McDougall, Dan McCarthy, George Benjamin Luks,
J. Campbell Cory, Paul West (creator of the Roly Polys), Louis Biedermann,
and many others. We also see that The World featured
stories by Samuel L. Clemens ("My First Lie and How I Got Out of It"), Robert
Edwin Peary ("Peary's Own Story From the Frozen North"), and Nikola Tesla ("Tesla's
Tidal Wave to Make War Impossible"). Baker notes in his introduction that once-discarded
newspapers are home to the stories and the essays of giants like John Steinbeck,
Thomas Edison, William Faulkner, and H. G. Wells. Steve Hines, a columnist
for The Brentwood Journal in Tennessee
and a self-proclaimed "literary prospector," has been able to find forgotten
works by Louisa May Alcott and Laura Ingalls Wilder by mining old magazines
kept at various libraries. What treasures are there to be discovered in old
newspapers?
Baker and Brentano have accomplished a tremendous feat, not only in saving
historical newspapers but also in presenting us with this fascinating book that
could rightly be a part of any American-history course. One can only hope that
libraries will acknowledge their previous mistakes and realize the importance
of preserving printed material, newspapers included.
Fernando E. Vega is a coeditor of Insect-Fungal Associations: Ecology and
Evolution, published by Oxford University Press in 2005.
Their Roles and Methods
By Mirjam M. Foot
New Castle, Del.: Oak Knoll Press, 2006
163 pages. $59.95
ISBN 1584561688
It's an exciting time to be a bibliographer. For most of the twentieth century,
W. W. Greg and Fredson Bowers's work on descriptive bibliography-deducing the
nature of the "ideal" copy of a book based on the evidence from copies of the
book itself-have influenced the work of book historians. Collectors and dealers
use modified forms of Greg and Bowers's methodology to determine that a book
is complete and not missing pages. Their work focused almost exclusively on
the hand-press period, before printing became automated, and considered only
the work of the printer and not of illustrators or bookbinders. The printed
page ruled in Greg and Bowers's world. After all, it was believed, once a stack
of unbound pages left the printer, anything could happen. The bibliographer's
mission was to figure out what the printer intended.
In the last decade, scholars have upended some of that received wisdom, proving
that publishers, or the pre-nineteenth century equivalent, bound far more books
than previously imagined. Many book historians argue that these original publisher's
bindings should now be an essential part of any descriptive bibliography. The
problem is that most bibliographers paid little attention to the bindings of
books printed before about 1820 and a lot of research needs to be done to identify
early publishers' bindings.
Mirjam Foot, a professor at University College in London, has taken an initial
step by surveying the published writings about bookbinders in the sixteenth
through early-nineteenth centuries. In Bookbinders
at Work, she considers the information found in early bookbinding handbooks,
encyclopedias, and other printed works that reference bookbinding. Many photographs
enhance her book, with color reproductions of bookbindings and of illustrations
depicting binderies.
Foot's book is a useful compendium of primary-source
materials, particularly her translations from binding guides written in languages
other than English. Much of what we know about early bookbinding has come from
the bindings themselves. Comparatively little research, before Foot's book,
has looked at the few surviving instruction manuals. The casual reader may have
trouble following the technical details, but most collectors of books printed
before 1820 will learn a great deal about bookbinding techniques from Bookbinders
at Work.
Currently, early books in original boards command a premium on the market.
Once it can be shown that some of the "contemporary" leather bindings are also
original to the book, prices for those volumes will likely start to rise. Then
the exciting times for bibliographers will become exciting times for the collectors
who have the right books.
Scott Brown